How everyday wetness—from finger smudges, sweat, and spilled drinks to showering and swimming—collides with consumers’ media devices designed to stay dry.License to Spill investigates the everyday moments, activities, and spaces where media technologies and liquids collide—from disastrous spilled drinks that corrode laptops and drops in the toilet that drown smartphones to the greasy finger smudges and sweat droplets that sully screens and glitch smartwatc...

Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and “like” something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the origins of today's push-button society by examining how buttons have been made, distributed...

Communication and Control: Tools, Systems, and New Dimensions advocates a systems view of human communication in a time of intelligent, learning machines. This edited collection sheds new light on things as mundane yet still profoundly consequential (and seemingly “low-tech”) as push buttons, pagers, and telemarketing systems. Contributors also investigate aspects of “remote control” related to education, organizational design, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, drones, and even binge-...